Sign of the Dragonfly: Chapter I

Slava didn’t like the wizard. She didn’t like his soft, slender hands, or his white skin, unmarred by windburn or the sun. She didn’t like his gentle voice or his long, flowing hair the color of cornsilk. His gold, though, she could tolerate. When they returned to Virk she would have enough to buy a tract of land and a small herd of goats, perhaps even a slave or two. She would find a good stout husband to raise her daughters and tend her hearth, her mother’s axe and shield on the wall until one of her girls showed the knack.

Just now, palms blistered from the oar, the back of her neck sunburned and peeling in spite of the long cotton flap of her rower’s coif, that dream felt a long way off. The wizard sat with Red Elka, their band’s captain, on the bench behind the drumwife’s seat, the two of them deep in conversation while the drumwife beat tempo with her cudgels. “Pull, you dogs!” she thundered. “You mewling boys! Pull!”

Slava pulled, leaning back in the seat she shared with her oarmate, a lean, lanky Outrimmer by the name of Kridel. After weeks of backbreaking rowing the crew of the Falirkast hardly needed the drumwife’s threats or the measured boom-boom of her cudgels against the taut hide of her drum. They were one mind in fifty bodies, muscles aching in tandem, bodies sweeping back and forth, back and forth, as they drove Falirkast into Saffron Bay, a thousand miles from the Virkish port of Crent. From the corner of her eye Slava had glimpsed a few merchant ships and other galleys making for open water off their starboard flank. 

“The wind is lazy today!” Kridel shouted over the crash of the surf. Her tattoos glistened in the spray. “Just like a man, eh? Make us pick up the slack.”

“The ones you fuck, maybe,” Slava grunted, leaning into their stroke. “Doss boys and goat thieves.”

“I like a pretty face.” 

“Up oars!” the drumwife bellowed. 

Slava and the others bent hard against the oars until they stood on end, then guided them into their wells and turned the oarlocks. Shoulders burning, Slava twisted to look past the griffin’s-head prow at the bay. The smart remark she’d intended to fire back at Kridel dried up in her mouth and blew away. She had reaved and raided from Shinrath to Loat, killed her first foeman at sixteen, taken braids and scalps and slaves in service to a dozen different chiefesses, but staring at Saffron Bay and the city of High Holy Amnh rising up the hills and cliffs above it, she felt like a child in her mother’s kit and harness. All of Virk was a dirty little pig run next to this.

The ships made a forest of the waterline. Three-masted traders and galleys and dhows flying the sigils of places Slava had never heard of. A vulture, gold and black, holding the sun in its talons. A snarling, toothed woman with snakes growing out of her scalp in place of hair. A skeleton trailing a veil of stars across the sun. Empires whose names she’d never heard. Peoples of whom she’d never dreamed. They stood at the rails and climbed in the rigging and rowed between the great wallowing tubs in sculls and coracles and launches. Black, brindled, teak, red clay. Hair like spun silk and hair shaved back from tattooed brows and dark hair in thick, shining braids worn coiled around long, elegant necks. Men and women, things between, and outside. And beyond that forest of swaying oak and hemp, sailcloth and cedar, the city.

The emperor’s palace stretched from the water’s edge up to the highest ridge of the seaward cliffs, the stepped limestone bulk of its central keep ringed by countless walls and courtyards and gardens, graceful towers rising from its corners. At the edge of the cliffs stood a great pharos, a lighthouse tower that must have risen a hundred feet or more to a beacon fire caged by cunningly conceived lenses of blown glass that magnified its blazing light. Thick black smoke swayed in a serpent over the water, unbothered by the sluggish, humid wind. All around it, manors of brick and stone rose from the hills, and beyond them a wall painted brilliant blue, and beyond it a vast sweep of tenements and markets, public baths and cedar trees, kitchens and workyards.

A dragonfly swept in low over the water, twenty feet from the tip of its segmented tail to its bulbous compound eyes, its gossamer wings an eye-watering blur whipping little wavelets from the bay’s calm waters. The crew shouted, some leaping to their feet, others clapping in delight or pointing for their oarmates’ benefit. A woman sat bent low over the insect’s body in a complex leather saddle, eyes hidden behind a shield of bronze with a slit across it. She wore a suit of loose, heavy canvas cinched at the wrists and knees above fitted gloves and boots. She was there one moment, gone the next, the great insect rising precipitously to flit over the swaying masts of the ships at anchor and dwindle into the distance.

“Ilga’s hammer,” said Kridel, eyes wide with childlike wonder. “They do exist.”

A functionary came to meet them at the outer docks, a stone jetty built up on wooden pilings on the bay’s eastern side, directly under the palace. The cliffs above were dizzying, rising sheer for what must have been four hundred feet. In Virk the chiefess would have sent a harbor clerk, usually a male slave, beardless and ink-stained, to record their ship’s name and take their gild for anchorage. This man had a little pointed chin beard and wore a tall black cap and layered robes of gray, pale green, and cream. His skin was the color of teak, his eyes pale. He wore his black hair long on the sides and done up in a bun at the back of his head, and a pair of guards followed after him, as though he were a citizen in his own right. Slava found it faintly revolting.

Red Elka swung herself over the longship’s side onto the dock and helped the wizard after. I thought they could fly, thought Slava, disappointed in spite of herself. The wizard said something in Amnese to the functionary, who bowed and accepted a little pouch of gild from Elka. Wizard and clerk conversed a little more before the functionary departed with another bow. The wizard watched him go, leaning on his spear. It made Slava uneasy to see a man go armed, but male wizards had the All-Queen’s dispensation to bear steel. Any other Virkishman would have been struck down in the street.

“Get your kit and stir your stumps,” the drumwife shouted. She was on her feet, her round shield on her back, her axes hanging from her belt and her helm under her arm. “We aren’t here to stare at cotzi.” 

Rowers took them ashore in launches, six to a boat crammed onto narrow benches while the boatman yammered at them in some sort of local argot. Slava, sweating in her mail coif and boiled leathers, her snow leopard skin thrown over her shoulder, caught maybe half a word in six, something about fire and celebration. There were orange flowers drifting against the hulls of the big ships they passed, whole rafts of their scalloped petals moving with the waves. Maybe it had been some kind of festival, like First Sun. She still remembered the first time she’d attended, riding on her mother’s shoulders as the men of the village donned bulky costumes of long, silky goat hair and danced in front of the roaring bonfires. She’d seen her own father leap and snarl, playacting as one of Ramrud’s locksmiths, the evil spirits who stole the sun away during the dark of the year, only to be defeated and cast down by Ilga and her winged warrior maidens, the ulkyria. Slava’s aunt Mehrheld had played the part of Ilga that year, resplendent in a gown of namil ringmail, her hair flying like spun gold in the winter wind. That night, as the sun reappeared for the first time in four long, cold months, six of the clan’s wives took their husbands in the dirt among the revelers, riding the naked men as costumed dancers leapt and spun over them and sparks swirled through the air, melting into the brief flash of golden sunrise and the bloody red of sunset a scant half-minute after. Her father, covered in sweat, had taken off his costume and come to sit with them near the chiefess’s table, resting his head on her mother’s knee while she scratched his thick, dark hair. 

That’s the life I’ll have, Slava told herself again as the launch brought them ashore. It was cold comfort against the madness of Amnh. Half-naked men drunk in the streets, laughing, unaccompanied. Avenues choked with butcher shops where creatures Slava had never seen hung quartered and halved from hooks alongside goats and boar and deer. There were armored fish longer than grown women, their jaws gaping as fishermen pulled them up still dripping by pulley arms, piglike creatures with prehensile trunks whose coats divided between black to just behind the forelegs and silver thereafter as neatly as though someone had planned a fence, beetles the size of barn cats with buttery soft underbellies butchers scooped out like melon flesh. There were frogs of every size and color, buckets full of snails in freshwater and in salt, cages filled with bats, with fowl, with strange little things like weasels with folds of soft, velvety skin joining their forelimbs to their hind. The smell was staggering, a bloody perfume hanging thick and laced with notes of shit and musk.

The other women kept close, following Elka and the wizard, who followed the functionary in turn. They passed dark little shops where people drank cloudy liquor from cut lengths of bamboo and smoked pipes full of something dark and aromatic. Slava had tasted shisha before, the smelly brown-black bricks of herbs smoked by sailors and merchants from Aruz and Barkult, and thought it might be something similar. Old women grilled filets of fish over smoldering coals. Whores of all sexes flashed their thighs or murmured promises from windows overlooking alleys. Some of the women laughed and blew them kisses, and even Slava was impressed by the lissom girl of perhaps sixteen who with a shy, blushing smile uncrossed her legs to reveal an eight-inch cock painted with delicate traceries of henna. There were mimen, too, pussy-boys with little mustaches and hairy bellies, only they had no collars, and no one was watching them.

They wound their way through bazaars and side streets, trading marts and plazas. Once they had to stop while a procession of black-skinned soldiers in tall white hats and red uniforms carried a sedan chair past, a woman’s silhouette just visible behind its lacquered panels. On the far side of the plaza, a fire-eater plied her trade for stray coins and applause, twirling her burning batons to sketch afterimages in humid air. A child tried to press some sort of shellfish into Slava’s hand as they crossed behind the sedan chair and its escort, entreating her in a language she didn’t understand, but withdrew at the look in her eyes. There were orphans enough back in Virk.

Finally, after an hour of walking through the pounding surf of alien faces and unknown tongues, just when she thought Amnh had taken her breath for the last time, Slava saw the elephant. She had heard of them before, seen old wives mimic their swaying trunks and the earsplitting trumpet of their call, but the reality took her utterly by surprise. They had just crossed a narrow footbridge and gone around what Slava thought must be a lumberyard when a huge beast emerged from a side street with earthshaking tread and sauntered past, a man — scandalously naked except for a breechclout and turban — sitting astride its neck some thirteen feet above the ground and guiding it with gentle taps of a long, flexible goad to its fan-like ears. Behind it the elephant dragged a sledge laden with bales of something Slava thought might be cotton covered in stitched-up oilcloth skins to keep the worst of the mud and dust and defecant at bay. 

“Tha, tha, tha,” said the driver, scratching the beast’s huge gray head. The serpent of its trunk coiled into an inquisitive arc as it saw the column of Virklanders. Slava looked and saw that even the wizard was dumbstruck, through the Amnhese official only seemed impatient to be on their way. He shouted something up at the driver, who waved him off without concern. The elephant’s huge, curving tusks came within a few feet of the line and a woman Slava had once seen behead a Vindish berserker with the rim of her shield shied back with a squeak of alarm. Some of the others laughed, but Slava couldn’t seem to find her voice. The elephant’s little black eyes, buried deep in wrinkled skin, seemed to twinkle with knowledge and mischief. It made its way onward, dropping a load of fragrant dung in its wake, its driver swaying with its tread.

“Split me, what a brute,” Kridel said at last, awestruck.

“No,” said Slava, not quite knowing why. “It was gentle. Didn’t you see?”

Kridel punched Slava’s shoulder as the column resumed its progress. “Go give its tail a pull, see how gentle it is.”

Slava wasn’t listening. She felt shaken by the sight of the great beast, and for minutes afterward the city around her seemed to fade into a haze. She barely glanced at the little party of Mantis Women they passed outside a glassblower’s, though she had heard tales of their cannibal islands almost from her cradle, and felt only a dull, aching urge to hide and squeeze her eyes shut and clap her hands over her ears when another of the great dragonflies buzzed low over the rooftops, alighting on a minaret a few streets over, its gossamer wings flashing in the sunlight, its rider dismounting and disappearing from view. 

At last the functionary brought them to a part of the city where the tenements and marketplaces gave way to workyards and stables, inns and public kitchens. Slava was soaked in sweat, her blond hair plastered to her neck and cheeks, her armpits chafing where her kit rubbed against her skin, and she’d been bitten several times by nasty little red flies that seemed to be everywhere in the city, when at last they came to an open stable with a roof of billowing canvas stretched over weathered wooden posts. A bearded man, stout and leathery with nut-brown skin, dressed in a robe and turban, stood in the stable’s yard, goading a strange dun-colored creature to run in a circle at the end of a rope. He turned with it, tap-tap-tapping the backs of its long legs as it groaned in apparent irritation, shaking its lumpen head. It had oddly beautiful lashes, long and dark like an odalisque’s, and its back rose up in a pronounced hump. As the column approached, it turned its head and spat at the bearded man, who sidestepped neatly. Kridel laughed.

“What in Ilga’s name is that ugly thing?” asked Slava. She didn’t like the look of the beast, nor the dozens of others like it she saw standing and lying in the shade of the stable house. It looked sneaky somehow. Dishonest. 

“They call it a camel,” said Kridel. “The brutes can go a week without water, I’ve heard it said, and twice as long with no forage. We must be in for a slog.”

The functionary greeted the stablemaster, if that was who the bearded man was, with a shallow bow, then began introductions. Red Elka and the wizard came forward. The drumwife hung back, her thick arms crossed, sunburn mottling her neck and shoulders. Slava supposed they would all be peeling like lizards before their quest was through. She wondered why they would need mounts that could go for weeks without food or water. What barren, hellish country awaited them outside Amnh’s crumbling walls of pink and red brick? The thought of leaving the city so soon made her feel oddly sad. She wished that she could go back to the market square and touch the elephant’s trunk. Inhale its smell of pepper, cinnamon, and good dark earth. 

Two riders emerged from the stables on camelback as the wizard and the stablemaster concluded their negotiations. The elder rider, a long-stemmed pipe clamped between his brown and pitted teeth, was weathered and bald, his skin the color of fired clay. To Slava’s deep disgust he wore a huge milk-colored snake on his shoulders. The younger, no more than thirteen or fourteen, was dressed like a servant in a simple saffron tunic and blue knee breeches. He had a broad, innocent face and big dark eyes.  

The snake-wearer said something in Amnhese, interrupting the functionary, who looked both annoyed and a little frightened. Slava wondered who this strange man was. She didn’t need to wonder long. After a short conversation, the wizard told them all.

“This is Pravan of the Yham,” the wizard said, turning to the column. He had a gentle voice, but there was no trace of husbandly submission in it. It made Slava’s skin prickle to hear him address women in that tone. “He is to be our guide through the Yhammat, the desert north of here. The object of our quest cannot be reached without crossing it.”

The stablemaster disappeared within the stable, followed by a pair of boys — Slava guessed them to be his sons. They all returned leading camels, and in short order the column set to filling saddlebags and learning the trick of mounting the ornery, disloyal beasts. Slava’s was a particularly ugly brute with a drooping lower lip and lighter hair marbled in whorls through her dun coat. She tried for a bite as Slava mounted her, but a firm smack on the snout made her think better of it. The servant boy, sitting high in his saddle, laughed. In spite of herself Slava laughed with him. She kicked her camel over to ride beside him as the rest of the column fell in with much cursing and swinging of sticks, the stablemaster and his sons helping women find their stirrups and showing them the proper way to cinch their saddle girths. Very different from horse riding. Through the press, Slava caught a glimpse of the wizard stepping without issue onto the back of a big male camel, almost pure white.

“Slava,” she said to the servant as she reached him, touching three fingers to her chest. “What’s your name, boy?”

The boy tapped his own chest, smiling. “Eyi kian Hama.”